Three days revealing Melania Trump’s comments about Christmas, ‘Melania and Me’ author Stephanie Winston Wolkoff is back with another recording of FLOTUS.
Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, Melania Trump‘s former best friend and trusted advisor, shared with HollywoodLife a tape she recorded of a conversation in which FLOTUS finds out that Stormy Daniels, the adult actress who allegedly had an affair with husband Donald Trump, landed a spread in Vogue. “It’s the porn hooker. Annie Leibovitz shot the porn hooker, and she’ll be in one of the issues,” Melania Trump says in the tape, which Winston Wolkoff secretly recorded in July 2018.
When Winston Wolkoff asks her in confusion who Leibovitz, one of the most famous fashion photographers in the world, “shot,” Trump clarifies that it’s “Stormy.” The First Lady continued, “Oh, you didn’t read it? Yesterday [it] came up. For Vogue. She shot her.” Note: while Daniels has done adult films, there is no support to the First Lady’s statement that she is a prostitute. Trump, according to Winston Wolkoff, was in a state of disbelief because, while she appeared on the cover of Vogue in her wedding dress in 2005, she hadn’t been offered a cover since becoming First Lady. Daniels appeared in the August 2018 issue of Vogue with her lawyer, Michael Avenatti.
The conversation came six months after news broke that Daniels signed a non-disclosure agreement shortly before the 2016 United States presidential election about an affair she allegedly had with Trump in 2006, right after the birth of his youngest son, Barron Trump, with Melania. Daniels was paid $130,000 for her silence by Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen; Cohen is currently serving a three-year sentence in home confinement after pleading guilty in December 2018 to tax evasion and campaign finance violations. As it turns out, Winston Wolkoff is actually the guest on the October 5 episode of Cohen’s podcast, Mea Culpa, in which she plays the new Trump tape.
In the episode, which was recorded before the President and First Lady were diagnosed with COVID-19, Winston Wolkoff shares new, intimate details about her friendship with Trump. HollywoodLife spoke EXCLUSIVELY with both Winston Wolkoff and Cohen before Mea Culpa‘s October 5 episode aired. The two actually have a lot in common. What Winston Wolkoff was to Melania, Cohen was to Donald, they explained. Cohen, who also recently released his own Trump tell-all, Disloyal, says that Winston Wolkoff is the “yin to my yang. You can’t really understand the evil of the power of two that’s living in our house, until you understand both.”
“What I found most interesting about Stephanie’s book is her interpretation and characterization of Melania,” he continued. “Because my interactions with [Melania], while many, are very different. I really learned a lot, especially in the very last question that I asked [Stephanie] in the podcast: ‘After they raided my home, my hotel room, my law office, and my safety deposit box, did [Melania] make any statements about me to you in regard to the raid and what was going on in my life?’” The answer was “upsetting,” Cohen said.
“I had spent so many years taking care of her issues, Donald’s issues, the kids’ issues, and she was just completely callous. And disinterested, identical to the way Trump behaved,” claimed Cohen. Winston Wolkoff and the future First Lady met in 2003, when she had just started dating Trump. The two women had lunch every month at the Mark Hotel in Manhattan and the Wolkoffs would vacation at Mar-a-Lago, she writes in Melania and Me, and their friendship continued when the Trumps made their move to DC.
The former director of special events at Vogue was an unofficial advisor to the First Lady until February 2018. She served as executive producer of Trump’s presidential inauguration in January 2017, and even helped FLOTUS craft her Be Best initiative. Their working relationship, and friendship ended in February 2018 after The New York Times reported that her company, SWW Creative, had been paid $26 million by Trump’s inauguration committee. Winston Wolkoff vehemently denies this. “Was I fired? No,” she told the outlet in 2019. “Did I personally receive $26 million or $1.6 million? No. Was I thrown under the bus? Yes.”
Stephanie also explained in a statement EXCLUSIVE to HollywoodLife why she decided to release the tapes: “When I wrote Melania and Me I knew that every word of it would be subject to potential scrutiny, so I made sure everything in the book was not only accurate, but fully provable. I will not sit back and allow the First Lady’s chief of staff, Stephanie Grisham, continue claiming I am [dishonest] to discredit the veracity of Melania and Me. Because the White House’s false claims about my character and integrity continue, I’ve had to take all appropriate steps to defend my name, which is why I released the tapes.”
Grisham told HollywoodLife in a statement in September after Melania and Me was published that, “This book is not only wildly self-aggrandizing, it’s just not truthful. It is an exercise in bizarre twisting of the truth and misguided blame for the sake of self-pity. It’s unfortunate and concerning that she’s overstated their friendship and her very brief role in the White House to this degree.”
Winston Wolkoff said that she taped her conversations with Trump for her “own protection and proof of innocence.” She explained via a statement to HollywoodLife that, “the First Lady, whom Stephanie regarded as a dear friend, told Stephanie that, the White House Counsel was tipped off to an investigation into the presidential inauguration committee’s spending of $107 million dollars, and although she and the President knew, ‘she [Stephanie] did nothing wrong,’ she would be made to take the blame for others’ misdeeds, self-dealings, false allegations, and financial improprieties.
Winston Wolkoff revealed that she “begged Melania to tell the truth” after the aforementioned The New York Times report about her firing. “Melania went so far as to tell Stephanie to ‘not to be so dramatic’ about the devastation it would cause to her life. At that point, it was painfully clear that Melania was no longer her friend,” she concluded in her statement to HollywoodLife.
HollywoodLife reached out to the White House for comment on this story but did not hear back as of press time.